Wind Powered Liberty: Victory
Posted by Glenn on February 22, 2006 - 7:43pm in The Oil Drum: Local
It's official, Lady Liberty will be running on wind power starting in March. Those of you who have been with me from the beginning will remember this classic PO-NYC post where I posed the idea for freeing lady liberty from the chains of fossil fuel:
What if we could power the Statue of Liberty with just Wind and Solar power?
...A Statue of Liberty that is energy independent and produces no harmful emissions into the atmosphere. This would be the best type of positive symbolism to assert America's path to energy independence....So who's with me? Let's start spreading the word and writing to some folks and get this idea circulated and see what happens.
And while I did get heavy traffic from many different sites including GE and I would love to believe that this all came about because of that one post, I realize that this idea is not completely novel. But it is still a victory for alternative energy and the "power" of a good idea who's time has come.
For more on this story head over to Greenbiz and Sustainablog.
Not to mention the fact that Libby is one hot chick.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I wave my windmill in your general direction.
Now the wind power here isn't going to amount to beans, but the value in all this is that it will get the attention of far more people than all of the excellent but esoteric technical analyses that appear here on TOD.
This is great opportunity for getting the energy problem front and center. The EROEI is this case irrelevant; the ATROAI (attention return on attention invested) is highly relevant.
This is one of the few good ideas I've seen in a long time, and I'd venture that it will have enornmous leverage in leading to all sorts of other things.
I consider myself to be about the most cynical person in the world, but I really like this one. Maybe I'm getting soft.
I encourage everyone to simply start showing up at your local community coucils, neighborhood associations, etc. and start talking about ways to change your local infrastructure to meet a post-peak world.
When the wind wont blow, Liberty will be in the dark.